In many business and government environments, a document such as a Power Point presentation or a Microsoft® Word Document is printed by the document's creator and circulated throughout the office to various managers, co-workers, engineers, scientists, etc., for comments, suggestions, modifications, and the like. Each user's comments are often provided back to the document's author in the form of handwritten markings made to the face their copy of the circulated original. In many businesses, government offices, law firms, and the like, it may be desirable to preserve such user-applied markings. In order to preserve these markings, typically the individual marked copies from each respective user are scanned into electronic form and stored as entire separate files along with the original. While this may seem like a straight-forward way to preserve this kind of information, in large office environments wherein many users regularly apply comments to their respective copies, storing scanned versions of each entire document to preserve such user-applied markings necessarily creates separate copies of the original document. This consumes more electronic storage space than is needed to preserve each respective user markings. Moreover, in many office environments, users such CEO's, CFO's, and senior management, want to review a document which has already been circulated which contains the various user-applied markings from their staff in a final composite document. Methods to selectively apply user markings to produce such a final composite document are also needed.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are systems and methods for preserving user-applied markings made to a hardcopy print of an original document.